Cardano Ecosystem Makes Notable Progress, ADA Price Rallies

• The Cardano Foundation highlighted substantial progress by core technology teams, showcasing advancements aimed at enhancing functionality and reliability.
• The recent release of Cardano node v.8.8.0-pre introduces testing capabilities for Plutus V3 scripts on SanchoNet, allowing developers to explore smart contract functionalities.

The world’s eighth-largest cryptocurrency Cardano has registered strong gains over the last week with the ADA price shooting past $0.62. As of press time, the ADA price is up by 17% on the weekly chart, and thanks to the massive development activity taking place on the Cardano blockchain last week.

In a recent update, the Cardano Foundation highlighted significant progress made by core technology teams, showcasing advancements in the Cardano ecosystem aimed at enhancing functionality and reliability.

The latest release, Cardano node v.8.8.0-pre, introduces the capability to test Plutus V3 scripts on SanchoNet, offering developers an opportunity to explore and experiment with the platform’s smart contract capabilities. Meanwhile, DB-Sync has initiated integration with the latest version of the Cardano node, signaling efforts to ensure seamless compatibility and interoperability across different components of the Cardano infrastructure.

The ledger team’s focus has centered on implementing crucial fixes, bolstering testing frameworks, and enhancing the overall reliability of the platform. Notable bug fixes include the retention of Anchor for proposal procedures in the ledger state, as well as ensuring JSON serialization of rational numbers in protocol parameters and governance procedures.

Moreover, a significant milestone has been achieved with the development of the cuddle Haskell package, aimed at transitioning to specifying CDDL (Concise Data Definition Language) in Haskell for all eras. This transition promises streamlined CDDL specification compilation, reduced duplication, enhanced specification reuse, and improved safety and correctness of specifications and decoders.

Key Developments Across Cardano Ecosystem

• Wallets and Services: This week, the Lace team diligently tackled core API usage issues, ensuring seamless preparation for an upcoming minor patch in version 1.8.2.
• Smart Contracts: Innovations abound this week with the Plutus team’s advancements in enhancing the Plutus IR inliner to facilitate the inlining of constants. This strategic adjustment consistently reduces script costs, often further optimizing performance.
• Scaling: The Hydra team made significant strides this week, focusing on forward compatibility for Conway support, unveiling the Hydra explorer tool, and enhancing model-based testing to accommodate a wider range of actions.
  The Mithril team introduced a novel data type to certify Cardano transactions within Mithril networks, alongside upgrades to the client library and CLI for transaction verification. They also launched the new Mithril network on SanchoNet and introduced a feature in the Pallas chain observer to support the retrieval of Mithril era markers.
• Voltaire & SanchoNet With the release of Cardano node version 8.8.0-pre, community members now have the opportunity to explore Plutus V3 in Conway-era transactions on SanchoNet. Plutus V3 introduces several exciting capabilities, including a new Voting script purpose for crafting voting scripts, access to governance actions in the ScriptContext, and new cryptographic Plutus primitives such as BLS, Keccak256, and Blake2b-224. For comprehensive insights into Plutus V3, refer to the recently published blog post.
• Catalyst Celebration ensues as the Project Catalyst team officially announces the results of Project Catalyst Fund11. Heartfelt congratulations to all participants in this round!
  Once again, community engagement shines brightly, reflecting the collective desire to voice opinions and steer the ecosystem’s evolution. Approximately 8,000 wallets collectively cast over 300,000 individual votes, determining 300 funded projects in this round. This milestone brings the total number of Catalyst projects to 1,647, with nearly 800 successfully completed.

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